Join me for a Punakha Festival

What Bhutan Gawaling is offering

Once a year a Dzong or an important village may hold a religious festival called a Tsechu. Villagers from the nearby villages come for several days of religious observances and socializing while contributing auspicious offerings to the monastery of the festival.
The central activity is a fixed set of religious mask dances, or Cham, held in a large courtyard. Each individual dance takes up to several hours to complete and the entire set may last 2 to 4 days. Observation of the dances directly blesses the audience and also serves to transmit principles of Tantric Buddhism to the viewers. A number of the dances can be traced directly back to Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal himself, the founder of Bhutan, and have been passed down essentially unchanged since the mid-1600s.
Prior to dawn on the final day of the tsechu a huge tapestry, or Thongdrel, is unfurled in the courtyard of the dzong for several hours. The mere sight of it is believed to bring spiritual liberation. The Thongdrel is ro